What do people use as an alternative to Slashdot to get their tech news then? (Or should I say news plus comments because the comments plus the ability to filter them based on rating is the most interesting thing).

Slightly undermined by the fact that you're offering an emotional rather than rational justification!

I'm sorry, but to my mind any definition of "crappy" must include the freedom to access any website, which many other first world nations (like the UK) do not enjoy.

Please post a link to a (non-child-porn) website that we in the UK can't access.

Fair enough, I've just started reading Slashdot again and skimming recent stories they seem to keep popping up. And this is the only place I ever see them.

How come there are Tesla stories nearly every day on Slashdot?

Wow, don't read slashdot much these days and came here looking for some sanity but only see three comments rated 5 of which yours is one. Maybe because it's a European story. But anyway, I think you are being incredibly naive about this. What is a newspaper but a repository of stories about other people. This gives those people the ability to make such stories disappear. This is a law that the rich and powerful are going to love. Remember when the Tory party removed all David Cameron's old speeches from their website because (presumably) it might get embarrassing having their promises quoted back at them? Well you ain't seen nothing yet. This kind of thing makes China look liberal. Madness.

Not much about Roy Trubshaw the original inventor of MUD but then again I used to work with Roy and had no idea he'd done such a thing in his student days. Lovely guy but not exactly a self publicist!

ADVENT was a great game, am pondering porting David Platt's A-Code to our rules engine...

And if you keep reading that thread you will find a post from the real Andrew Lamb which is so utterly different in tone that it is clear that the AC post is a troll by some sad bastard.

Hurrah - it's been weeks since the last new programming language!

Love the way Americans call it a jump rope so as not to sound too girly :)

Segmented stacks is an implementation issue. Java on z/OS has had segmented stacks from the very beginning because it runs on LE (the z/OS Unix layer) and that's what LE does. You still have a problem with thousands of threads though because you have to choose an initial stack segment size. Too big and you still consume loads of memory, too small and there is an overhead associated with crossing the segment boundary (e.g. page fault).

First of all, research has shown again and again that harsh penalties simply do not work as a deterrent to other offenders.

Citation please and without it, why has this been modded up to 5? The sentence has created huge publicity here in the UK and that if nothing else should make the looter cretins think twice before posting similar incitements to riot.

And yes, it's quite possible that another riot is around the corner. NOBODY expected what happened last Monday and who's to say it won't happen again.

Likewise this is typical smart-ass Slashdot BS along the usual lines of "nothing to see here, move along please". By not even bothering to read or think about the article (no time, so many feeds to keep up with!) you're kind of making his point for him.

Don't quite understand this. The implication is that the time spent processing the message in the TCP/IP stack (and not the network latency itself) is a significant percentage of the overall transaction time. Which seems unlikely. Also they have (say) 1000 front-ends connecting to 100 matching engines. So why not simply add extra cores to the front-ends and do the matching there? Just cut out the network latency altogether. I know they say the traders can't connect directly to the matching engines but that's just semantics - there's no difference between having the separation physically and within the same machine.

Linkedin is the only other "social media" account I have and I will never have a Facebook account and shunned MySpace when it was introduced. For me, the lack of any social decency that stems from anonymity is simply not worth it.

Unless you have some very strange friends you should give Facebook a try. Everyone I know (and as far as I can tell everyone that they know) uses their own real name.